Jon Oliva meets the “Father of
Live Metal”
April 15, 2010
He was born before rock n' roll began. He watched Elvis
Presley and The Beatles perform live on the Ed Sullivan TV
show. He saw his first concert in 1965—The Beach Boys—and
the price of a ticket was $3.50. His most recent concert on
April 11, 2010 was Trans-Siberian Orchestra and the ticket
price was $76.50. Hundreds of other shows fill the large gap
between.
He attended college from 1966-1970, during the height
of the counter-culture movement, with hippies and flower power,
and the anti-Vietnam War protests. He was in college during
the "Summer of Love" (1967) and Woodstock (1969).
While in college he was also a disc jockey, who's program
led the way by playing music from the early psychedelic bands
that are now '60s classic rock: Jefferson Airplane, Blues
Magoos, Electric Prunes, Strawberry Alarm Clock, Love, The
Doors, Jimi Hendrix Experience, Steppenwolf, Iron Butterfly,
Deep Purple, Led Zeppelin, The Who, and many, many others.
He later witnessed the birth of heavy metal, and one
of his favorite mottos is "If it's too loud, you're too
old." And, he is, of course, still rocking after all
these years.
OK, so who in the hell are we talking about here? He's
Roger Maki, father to both Jeff and Greg Maki who now run
this website, Live-Metal.net. Apparently the metal gene is
proving to be a strong one that will surely be passed down
from generation to generation.
Jon Oliva, mastermind of Savatage and Jon Oliva's Pain
(who's new album, Festival, was released April 13, 2010) and
co-creator/songwriter of the Trans-Siberian Orchestra, recently
called in to chat with the forefather of Live Metal.net.
Take it away, Dad ...
Live-Metal.net: My
son, Jeff, and my other son, Greg, maintain the (Live-Metal.net)
website, and they know that I’ve been a fan of your
music for many years, so they asked me if I would conduct
the interview. So, this is my first interview for them, so
I’m nervous, kind of the way that you said you were
nervous when you were doing the Festival video.
John Oliva: Oh, yeah.
So, after so many public
performances, why were you nervous doing the video?
I don’t know. I’ve never done anything
like that before where it’s kind of like an inside type
of look at stuff, so it was kind of just weird for me so,
uh, used to talk about it on the phone but then on camera
it’s a whole different ball game. So it’s just
a little weird. So I was a little nervous about it but, at
the end result, I really liked it. People really seemed to
like it so I’m going to do more of those, I think.
Yeah, great. I enjoyed watching
it.
Cool.
So far I’ve only heard
a few sound clips from Festival. I certainly intend
to buy it after it’s released next week.
Cool.
How does it compare to the other
JOP albums?
Well, actually, this one I think is a little darker, a little
heavier, a little bit more edgy. I think the sound’s
a little bit more raw. I played a lot of guitar on this, so
I think that kind of changed the sound a little, gave it a
little bit more of a darker sound, because my guitar playing
is a little bit on the dark side. I think that’s really
the main … and the fact that we’ve done three
other ones, I think this one is, to me, definitely the best
of the four that we’ve done, mainly just because we’ve
worked, now, on three other projects.
So, I’ve got a pretty good idea of what the guys do
and how we work. I think that this one was just the result
of being together for a few years, and doing a few albums
and, like anything, the more you do it the better you get
at it. With these guys I think the first couple of records
they were a little bit uptight and just kind of nervous because
they had never done anything like this before. I think now
everything is running smoothly. I think this album was a lot
more fun for everybody because there really wasn’t any
weirdness going on. It was just everyone knew what they were
doing, and everybody was on the same page and it just went
very smooth.
Okay, great. I can’t wait
to listen to the whole thing.
Cool.
Why did you decide to call your
group Pain?
Ha, ha. Actually, it was a joke, because, what it was, I
was going to call it Taj Mahal, and that’s the name
I wanted to use, and then right before we had to go to press
I got a phone call from my managers in New York and they said,
“I’ve got some bad news for you. You can’t
use the name because it’s already being used by somebody,”
and I was, like, “Oh, man, what a pain in the ass.”
And we were sitting around the studio and I was, like, and
it just came out “This is such a pain, because this
has happened to me before.” And then I just looked at
them and I said, “That’s it.” And I said,
“We’ll just call it JOP.” And they go “JOP?
What’s that?” I said, “Jon Oliva’s
Pain.” I said, “That’s what you guys are
right now, is a pain in my ass.” And that was it, ‘cause
we just wanted something short and sweet, so I said, “Well,
you know, people will just call it JOP, which stands for Jon
Oliva’s Pain.”
So that’s really how it came about. It’s just
I was under the gun; I needed a name by the next morning.
I had that other idea for so long, and no one said anything
until a couple of days before we had to turn in the titles
and everything. So, to me, it was just a big pain in the neck,
and it was kind of just a joke. I said “We’re
going to call it JOP, anyway, like ELP or TSO, so we have
JOP.” That was kind of where that was going. The name
really didn’t mean much to me. I was just going to call
it Oliva at first, and then Taj Mahal, and it just ended up
being JOP at the last second.
Okay. Over the years it seems,
to me, that both Savatage and JOP have played a lot more concert
dates in Europe compared to the U.S.
Yeah.
Why is that?
In the earlier days, back in the late ‘80s, ‘90s,
Savatage played a lot of U. S. dates. For two, three years
we were on the road pretty much consistently. As the late
‘90s started coming in, the club scene here in America
was dwindling. That really started in the early ‘90s
when they changed a lot of the drinking laws to 21. Half the
crowds, half the audience was gone because half the audience
were people under 21. The club scene just started dwindling.
My thing was “I’m not going to go out and play
and spend all of this money traveling around playing in front
of 300 people every night in a bar. The bigger venues were
too big for a band our size and smaller venues, which we used
to sell out and were packed, as soon as they started changing
the drinking laws everywhere, we’d come back the next
year and there’d be half the crowd. A lot of the places
were closing down because the guys lost so much income.
And then the TSO thing started happening, and as the TSO
thing started getting bigger and bigger, the need for me to
worry about doing stuff here in the States wasn’t as
big as it was before the TSO thing. And my big crowd, from
Savatage on, was always a bigger act in Europe than it was
here in America, for whatever reason. We just seemed to do
much better business there. So, I said, “In my eyes,
I’ve got the TSO thing now going really good here in
America, which is basically Savatage guys anyway.” “And,”
I said, “that thing is finally successful.” So
I can concentrate my focus on my own stuff on Europe where
I’m selling a lot of material and I’m playing
shows in Europe in front of 60,000 people. Here I’m
lucky if I get 600 people. It just didn’t weigh out.
I’m not 21 anymore and I didn’t feel the need
to be touring around in Dayton, Ohio playing in front of 200
people on Wednesday night. It wasn’t doing me any good;
it’s not doing the people any good; I’m not making
any money; and, I’m away from home all the time. And
it takes away from my writing and everything like that. It
really wasn’t that I don’t want to tour America;
it’s that it’s just not financially something
that I can afford to do. They’re not paying the money.
The bars aren’t making it. The clubs aren’t making
the money that they used to make anymore. It just turns into
a big nightmare.
Then you have to go and do a show and you gotta scale everything
down. In my mind I feel like I’m ripping people off
because I can’t give them the kind of show I want to
give them at that kind of money. You can’t bring in
the light show you want. You can’t bring in the sound
system you want. You’re basically stuck having to use
whatever the clubs can supply you. I don’t know if you’re
aware of that, but nine times out of ten it’s not very
good. And then the show suffers, and the people don’t
know that. They just go “Oh, the band sounded like shit,”
or “The band looked like crap, sounded like crap.”
You could be up there busting your ass, but you’re at
the mercy of what the club or the promoter are going to supply
for you. I was finding that happening to me more and more,
where my fee would go down like (let’s take a number)
$5,000 that I would get one year to $2,500 or $2,000. When
you have a band and crew and a truck and hotel rooms and all
that, you just can’t make ends meet and you end up losing
money. In a way, I wouldn’t mind losing money if I was
playing in front of 1,000 – 1,500 people every night
in a club like the Agora Ballroom or, I don’t know what
part of the country you’re located in. Where are you
guys at?
We’re in Maryland.
Okay. I used to play Hammerjack’s a lot. What was the
place under the freeway there in Baltimore?
Right. It burned down; it’s
gone.
It’s gone now. You see what I mean? I used to play
The Bayou a lot in Washington, which was a two-level club
that you could put 800-900 people in there. That’s really
what directed me toward Europe. I go to Europe, I get paid
top dollar, I get to see the world, I’m playing in front
of sold out crowds every night, I’m playing festivals
during the summer in front of 50,000-60,000 people. To me,
I’m 50 years old, I don’t have time to mess around
anymore, or I don’t have time to sit there and break
new ground. I’m too old to play colleges, so it’s
kind of like the way things are. I’ve got the TSO thing
here and that’s doing amazing.
I discovered your music when
I saw “Gutter Ballet” on MTV’s Headbanger’s
Ball.
Oh, God.
Yeah, a long time ago. Hey, I’m
a lot older than you are, so don’t feel bad.
Okay, I won’t feel bad.
One of the things that impressed
me was the use of strings in that song. It seemed so unusual
for a string section in a hard rock/heavy metal song. Why
did you decide to do that?
I was always a big Beatles fan when I was growing up, even
though when we started we were a really, really heavy metal
band. My brother and I, our influences were the Beatles, Queen,
The Who, and then Black Sabbath came about, and then something
happened to us when we got introduced to Black Sabbath. The
whole heavy thing kind of got born from there, but we never
lost those roots or those things. As we were developing in
Savatage we would try to sneak stuff in a little bit in the
beginning before we started working with [producer] Paul [O’Neill].
Once we met Paul, he was also a big fan of Queen and stuff
like that, and he kind of encouraged us to work some strings
in there, and we’d be like “Oh my God, the fans
are going to hate it.” And he’s like “No,
they’re not. It just shows a different side of what
you guys do. Show them everything.” So we started getting
lightened up about then and we started trying things.
On Gutter Ballet we used orchestra on a few songs
– “When the Crowds Are Gone,” some on “Summer’s
Rain,”“Temptation Revelation,” and the title
track. And it just seemed very comfortable to us and we really
enjoyed it, and it gave us a little bit of our own identity
in the heavy metal/hard rock field. That’s kind of how
it started. It was really just Paul saying “Don’t
hold back on doing things because you think people aren’t
going to like it. People like you because of what you guys
do, and if they really like you they’re going to like
everything.” A band like Queen and a band like The Beatles,
that’s a perfect example, because those are two bands
just right off the top that can play anything. The Who is
another one. I mean a song like “Behind Blue Eyes"
and then a song like “Won’t Get Fooled Again,”
they’re two totally different worlds as far as the type
of song. The same thing with the Beatles. Queen had many songs
like that – “Love of My Life” compared to
“Death on Two Legs.” I think that’s what
made those two bands so popular – their versatility
– so people wouldn’t get bored, because you didn’t
know what to expect from track to track. If I go out and buy
a Motorhead album – and I love Motorhead – I’m
pretty much sure of what it’s going to sound like from
track one until track ten. It’s really not going to
vary much. They same thing with a Slayer album or even a Metallica
album. I like to make it so that you don’t know what
to expect. It might be a ballad, it might be a heavy metal
song, it might be a rock and roll song, it might be a rock
ballad, it might be a theatrical song or an epic song. I think
it’s good; keep people guessing.
Right, I agree. Way back in 1969
there was a rock group called SRC, and they recorded Grieg’s
“In the Hall of the Mountain King” on one of their
albums. I was wondering if you knew about that.
No, that was actually Paul’s idea to do that. I never
heard of SRC, huh?
Yeah. It stands for the Scott
Richardson Case. They were never hugely popular, kind of in
the underground circuits of ’69 and ’70.
I’ll have to look that up. I knew that Grieg did the
song but I didn’t know that someone else had recorded
that whole piece. I’m going to have to check that out.
There’s an obvious classical
music influence in the TSO albums.
Oh, God.
I think it’s fantastic;
I love that. Also throughout some of your other music there’s
some strains of it. The song “Night Castle,” itself,
sounds classical to me. I didn’t read anything in your
bio about any kind of classical training.
None! No, just listening. My mom was a big classical fan.
My dad, for a while, was a concert pianist when he was younger,
so we always had a piano in the house. I remember when my
dad used to go to work when we were kids my mom used to always
put on Mozart while she was just going around cleaning the
house. Most people back then were listening to Elvis and stuff
like that. My mom was listening to Mozart and Rachmaninov
and stuff like that, and she just loved it. She said it calmed
her nerves. So, it was just in the house all the time, and
it was being played all the time. I guess that’s what
kind of gets installed in you.
As I got a little older and started getting into the sounds
like “Eleanor Rigby,” it was a big song when I
was young. I used to love the strings in that. That kind of
opened the door to me to experience and listen a little more
because I loved the way The Beatles did it. I started listening
to it a little bit. I didn’t sit there and really get
into it at first, but as I got older I listened more and more,
and tried to listen to what they did. I was always amazed
at how the cellos played one part, the violins played another
part, and then the violas played another part. Instead of
like in a rock band, the guitars, they basically play the
same thing until somebody breaks off into a solo. So, I was
like “This is interesting, if you had one guitar playing
a different part completely.” So those type of things
start running in your brain, and you start going “Well,
let me experiment with this. What if we have on guitar part
go like this and kind of like use that guideline?” And
that’s how we experimented with stuff like that, Chris
[Oliva] and I, at a pretty young age.
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One of the signatures of a lot
of your songs is the piano introduction.
Yeah, I love those.
I guess that would be coming
from your father’s influence as a piano player?
Yeah! I love piano, man. I was always a big, big fan of piano,
and I love little intros. A song is like a little story, a
little book. Kind of like a mini- book, so you want your little
opening, and then you want the meat of the book, and then
you want your ending. That’s how I try to look at it.
I love little nice piano intros with cool melodies, and then
throw a twist in it and maybe go into something heavy or something
completely different.
I’m not a musician so I
don’t know if I have this question right or not, but
there’s another part of a number of your songs that
I really enjoy, and I think it’s called vocal counterpoint?
Yeah.
Like “Chance,”“One
Child,”“Morphine Child”…
Yeah, actually, Paul and I came up with that on the Handful
of Rain album. It was the first time we used it, on a
song called “Chance.” I remember being in Morris
sound studios here in Tampa. It was right after my brother
had passed away, and Paul and I were like “Well, we’ve
got to come up with something. We’re never going to
replace Chris.” I remember that was our big thing –
we’re never going to replace him, that part of the sound.
If we’re going to continue to do this, we’re going
to have to try to forge some new territory. We had Zak [Stevens]
at that time who was singing, and I sing, and so in a rehearsal
type of mode, in a writing situation, we were just trying
things where Paul would sing one part, and then we’d
say “Okay, Zak, we want you to sing this part, and then
I’ll sing this part.” Then we would test it. I
would just sit there at the piano, the three of us would just
stand around the piano, and then we were like “Wow!
What if we just take this one part and have 25 Zaks singing
this part, and then 20 Johns singing this part?” That’s
how it all started. I think it was done before; I think people
have done it before. No one ever really ever did it to the
extent I think that Paul and I took it, because we really
started getting insane with it.
“Wake of Magellan,” that was tough to do live,
man. That was all [singing] “Columbus and Magellan and
de Gama sailed upon the ocean ...” You would be doing
that stuff live and then trying to play the music at the same
time, and it was always an off beat. You’re used to
playing your instrument on beat, but in the meantime you have
to sing “Bada bada hubba hubba hubba hubba” all
against it. Oh, God. Perish the thought if you had a couple
beers or something before the show, because you were definitely
going to look like an idiot. It happened many times that we
looked like idiots. I don’t know if the audience knew
it, but we knew it.
I love those parts in those songs,
so keep it up.
I will.
When I first started listening
to Savatage, I started telling my friends about the group,
and one of the things that I told them is that I thought your
music had a more sophisticated sound than what other rock
groups had, and that your lyrics were more intelligently written.
I don’t know if that’s something that just happened,
or if it’s something you do consciously, or am I just
full of crap?
I’ll be honest with you. In the early part of the band,
if you listen to the albums from before Hall of the Mountain
King, that’s all me writing the lyrics, and those
lyrics are not quite as good. On [Hall of] the
Mountain King and Gutter Ballet, Paul and I
wrote the lyrics together, and he is just so amazing at writing
lyrics and coming up with stories. In fact, I don’t
know where he gets them from, to be honest with you. It is
just so amazing, and by the time we got Streets [a
Rock Opera] I was like “Right. You know
what? I’ll tell you what, Paul,” because I never
liked writing lyrics, anyway. I always toiled with lyrics.
I can do it, and I do it, but it’s not fun for me to
do. It’s work. I have to really sit there and it takes
me a long time to write lyrics for a song. This guy just comes
in and he goes “Oh, well, we can do it about this: blah
blahblahblah blahblahblahblahblah blahblahblahblah.”
Like “You son-of-a-bitch.” Here I am sitting here
for three weeks trying to write one verse and this guy comes
in and writes out the lyrics for “Strange Wings”
in about 15 minutes. I wanted to kill him. He’s just
so good at it, and I was like “Paul, why don’t
you handle the lyrics, and if you need any help, just let
me know, and Chris and I will worry about the music.”
The music was getting a lot more intricate at that time.
That’s how it worked, and then we developed that. I
just kind of turned the lyrics over to him. I said, “You
do such a great job at it and it makes me able to focus more
on the music side of it and stuff, and not have to worry about
toiling with lyrics for six months.” That’s how
we just developed that working relationship. Now, when I start
doing the JOP thing, it came after I hadn’t done lyrics
after about 15 years. Well, now I’ve got some shit to
say so I’ll handle the lyrics again on my thing so that
I can get everything off of my chest that I’ve got to
get off. He is just amazing at writing lyrics.
Have you been involved in putting
together the current Beethoven’s Last Night tour?
Oh, yeah! I was up there in Connecticut with them for rehearsals
about three weeks ago, four weeks ago. I had forgotten …
I only thought I wrote one or two songs on that thing, and
then when I got to the rehearsals, and they were running through
the show, I was like “Wait a minute. I wrote that.”
I end up having seven or eight songs in the show, which was
weird. For some reason I thought that I only had one or two
songs on that album, because I was sick during that time that
we were doing that. I must have not remembered, because after
we did the album I had never listened to it until a few weeks
ago. I just never have. When I have bad memory of things –
I was very sick at that time and my wife was sick, and it
was a really miserable period of time for me during that Beethoven record. Once you get over that you just want to get moving
on and sweep it under the carpet. Yeah, I was involved with
helping them put the light show together and all that stuff
and choosing the vocalists that we’re using and the
tour is going really good. Actually, they’re playing
Radio City Music Hall tonight. I’m supposed to be there
for it, but I don’t think I’m going to make it.
I’m going to see the show
this Sunday in Washington, DC.
Oh, excellent!
Any chance you’ll be there?
No. They told me now I’m going to Texas, because we’re
doing some filming. Because I have family in New York, I was
going to come up for tonight’s show, and then travel
through the weekend through Washington and then come back
home, but Paul decided that we’re going to film the
last two or three shows in Texas, so now they’re like
“Well, we really need you to come to Texas,” and
I have all these interviews to do for my album so I made the
sacrifice and said, “Shit. I’m not going to Radio
City. I’m going to sit and do interviews instead, and
then I’m going to go to Texas. So, that’s the
new game plan.
I never got to see Savatage perform.
I’d love to see JOP sometime soon. Are you going to
announce a U. S. tour anytime soon?
Yeah, there is that possibility of us doing some shows. I
know they would be in the Northeast, also, so it would definitely
be in your area. I believe there’s somebody talking
to my agent now about that. They started talking last week
about maybe doing some stuff in mid-August, early September
because we have a big tour in Europe starting in October and
we wanted to string like maybe ten or twelve shows together
in the States just to get the band tight and get used to being
on the road again. So there is a very good possibility I may
be floating up in your area here in the next few months. It’ll
be announced; there’ll be something on our website,
and everything, announcing it. Right now they’re just
putting everything together.
Okay, great. That was my last
question. Is there anything else that you’d like to
say to your fans?
I just thank you very much, and enjoy the album. I’ll
warn you it’s an album you’ve got to listen to
two or three times because there’s a lot of stuff going
on in the background. I put a lot of little secret things
in there that you’re going to have to get some headphones
out. You’ll really love them once you discover them.
Just have a good time, and I hope to see you all on the road,
and everyone take care.
Right. Thank you for your time.
Thank you, sir. You have a good time. Enjoy the show on Sunday.
Related links:
www.jonoliva.net
www.savatage.com
www.trans-siberian.com |
